Steel Interstate Concept

The Steel Interstate System is a core national network of high capacity, grade separated, electrified railroad mainlines. It would realize for railroads what the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System achieved for roads, and would become the backbone for movement of both goods and people in the 21st Century.

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Click on the Steel Interstate logo to go to the internet home of
the North American Steel Interstate Coalition.

The concept for the Steel Interstate System in the U.S. is for a grade separated 2 to 3 track, electrified system accommodating both freight and passenger rail as depicted in the design features of the illustration by Craig Thorpe.

The concept of a Steel Interstate System in the U.S. is analogous to the Interstate Highway System that has been built out over the last 50 years. That has given us a core national network of high-capacity, grade-separated roads that made travel faster and safer than on the old system of U.S. Routes.

Today’s railroads are like the old U.S. Routes – built a long time ago and often seriously under-engineered and lacking in capacity to handle the demands of today’s shipping volumes. Therefore, a dollar of transportation investment made today can often have a bigger impact in increased freight-carrying capacity when invested in rail instead of in more highway lanes.

The railroads have been investing billions of dollars in improved infrastructure, but they are limited in what they can do with internally generated funds from earnings. To restore balance in our national transport network, we need a steel interstate program funded though government-private partnership to create a core network of high-capacity privately owned rail freight corridors for the 21st Century. This same system can be used for passenger rail for medium to short range distances and as a feeder to high speed passenger rail.

This approach would only be used where public benefits exceed public investment cost. But there is another vital consideration. Today in the U.S. our national transportation system is virtually 100% dependent on oil. We need to be planning now to cope with a world without cheap and abundant oil, or without oil at all!

Railroads can be readily electrified, so our Steel Interstate can be powered by whatever fuels (nuclear, coal, solar or renewables) are then being used for electrical generation.

With proper planning over ensuing decades, we can have a core national steel interstate system in place before oil (or natural gas) becomes prohibitively expensive or runs out. Featuring a network of high-capacity, electrified rail lines, it would be the backbone for movement of both goods and passengers in this country.

Long-distance trucks can also be carried on such trains. Though this has been done in Europe for some time, the knee-jerk approach to accommodating trucking growth in the U.S. has always been to build ever more lanes of highway.

The RAIL SolutionSteel Interstate ConceptWhitepaper (click to download pdf) was created in 2011.